Scott completely misses this important fact: Some ideas (really collections of ideas) are easier to execute in one medium than another. Rather than some large

Scott completely misses this important fact: Some ideas (really collections of ideas) are easier to execute in one medium than another. Rather than some larger commentary on ideas versus execution the complaint that "X wouldn't make a good movie" is usually meant in the sense that the things that made X good in medium A would not translate well to medium B, where B==film. For instance I think it's perfectly fair to say that it's not a good idea to make Lord of the Rings into a musical. You may counter that the execution is everything, but I'd respond that if you made a good musical out of the material, it wouldn't be LotR -- it would be some vaguely related thing. It would necessarily lose some of the things that make LotR great. While I greatly admire Ed Catmull and his insights into teams, I don't think his "good team will fix bad idea" comment is relevant here. Part of implementation is choosing your implementation medium. Pre-specifying the medium (i.e. let's make X into a film) is an implementation decision. It would be analogous to a startup saying "let's take this great system and re-implement it, but it has to use technologies UVW". That's an implementation decision that may be badly flawed.